The World’s Hottest Pepper: Taste Test of ‘The Last Dab’ Hot Sauce
A little dab’ll do ya. Photos by Kevin Gibson
About 20 years ago, as my obsession with hot sauce was in the early stages of its journey, I tried my first dab of Blair’s After Death Sauce at a long since closed local sauce and spice shop. I coughed, I cried, I sneezed, I hiccupped. The clerk gave me a free soft drink and apologized, offering me something a bit less fiery.
“No,” I said. “I’ll take a bottle.”
Having cut my teeth in recent years making my own sauce with peppers ranging from Habaneros to Scorpion peppers to Ghost peppers, I thought I was braced for anything, even the official (per the Guinness Book of World Records) hottest pepper on Earth, the Carolina Reaper.
But in recent times, a guy by the name of Smokin’ Ed Currie has been creating hotter and hotter pepper hybrids, first leading to the Reaper and then a mysterious entry called Pepper X. So, what did he do next? He created a hybrid of those two and called it the Apollo pepper.
That one came onto the scene late in 2020 and apparently wasn’t widely distributed or used, per one source I found, “for safety reasons.” Well, there is a sauce on the market using Apollo peppers, and I was gifted one for Christmas.
Brought about thanks to the popularity of “Hot Ones,” the web game show on which celebrity guests answer questions in between eating increasingly hotter chicken wings, the show-endorsed The Last Dab is now available online and in stores. Yep, it’s boiling with heat. How hot? Some estimate the Scoville Units rating of the Apollo pepper as approaching 3 million.
For perspective, a jalapeno pepper, which many consider hot, tops out at about 8,000 Scoville Units. A habanero pepper, which most people I know would never let near their mouths in raw form, clocks in at around 150,000. So, yeah, 3 million is a ton of capsaicin. (Wikipedia.com lists the sauce itself as being about 2 million Scoville Units.)
You should have seen my face when I first opened it and poured a couple drops on a tortilla chip, without doing any inquiry as to just what I had gotten myself into. I ate one chip, thought, “Hey, this is pretty good.” So, I dabbed more onto another chip and ate it in one bite. And then I put two or three sizeable drops on yet another.
And then it hit me, and I was transported back to the afternoon in around 1999 when that After Death Sauce took hold. I coughed. I slurped milk – repeatedly. And the burn lingered for what felt like an hour. Of course, since I was caught unaware, I didn’t take notes on the experience; instead, I made a mental note to look into exactly what the hell an Apollo pepper was.
So here we are. When I went back in, I decided to do a more controlled tasting, so as to pay more attention to the flavor profile, and just how quickly the heat ramps up. Let’s go chip by chip.
CHIP ONE
One whiff of The Last Dab is all it takes to know what’s coming. The intense capsaicin burns through as if you’re burying your nose into the spicy meat and seeds of a fresh Reaper pepper, and you can actually feel it tingling your olfactory. Interestingly, the burnt orange color isn’t intimidating – which could set someone up for a big surprise.
I wolf down the chip fairly quickly, and almost immediately the fruity essence of the pepper shines through with perhaps just a tiny inkling of a sort of citrusy sweetness. But the peppery heat quickly slams in behind it and sets a tingle to the back of the tongue, which is the most receptive part of the palate to spice. As it sets in for about two minutes, I’ve already got a steady burn that now spreads the length of my tongue and has begun to touch the inside of my jaws. It’s as if I’ve just eaten a raw serrano or some other medium-hot pepper – and that’s from essentially one large-ish drop.
CHIP TWO
My nose already threatening to drip, I go in for chip two, with a couple of drops’ worth this time around. That delicious fruit flavor pleases my tongue yet again, but it takes maybe three seconds before the heat hits the back palate and the first cough comes out, involuntarily, as it slams into the back of my throat. Now the top part of my throat is burning along with the back and now sides of my tongue. The fruity flavor quickly fades into the background.
CHIP THREE
My palate now ablaze, along with the roof of my mouth, and my left nostril dripping, I coat chip three with a much larger dose. I bring it to my lips and open wide – and after I crunch quickly, chew three or four times and swallow, I then start a timer to see how long this intense burn takes to begin to subside. Currently, it’s intensifying (48 seconds) and showing no sign of backing off. My nose is fully running now and I’m trying to choke down a cough as my throat burns.
A minute and a half in and it’s still intensifying slightly. As I approach two minutes, however, I feel it begin to level off a bit. Still, the burn remains, sits there, and it begins to feel less like an intense tingling and more like dozens of little jabs from a plastic cocktail spear. The roof of my mouth feels similarly to when you take a bite of piping hot pizza and melt your skin, which is a bit crazy for a pepper sauce. A cough sneaks out and now I feel like I am breathing fire like (nerd alert) Smaug the dragon.
At five minutes, I take a drink of water; it helps only briefly, so I wait another minute or two before I go in for another dose.
CHIP FOUR
Again, the wonderful fruity flavor, which now seems to bear notes of a sweet and tangy Roma tomato, strides forth. But this next dose of The Last Dab almost immediately reignites the fire in my mouth, even if the flavor seems to peek through more than before. Hey, maybe that’s part of what makes this stuff so addictive … and potentially so dangerous. I then feel the burn creeping under my upper lip, another cough comes out and I fight back a sneeze, so now I’m calling it quits.
To drink some milk. (Hey, at least I never hiccupped this time.)
Conclusion: Don’t mess with this stuff if you’re an amateur. I’ve been eating hot sauce and hot peppers for more than two decades, and this sauce is even a challenge for me. (The burping begins even as I type this.) That said, with a few gulps of milk, it took maybe five minutes for my palate to get back close to normal. And the goal here wasn’t to injure myself by over-indulging, just to see how quickly this sauce will get you to the boiling point. Your mileage may vary.
If you’re already into your hot sauce journey and looking for intense experiences, well, this one is definitely worth getting (usually between $20 and $25 per bottle), because it does bring an enjoyable flavor — however briefly that flavor stands forth before the sauce turns your mouth into an endorphin-fueled inferno. Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you.
My big conclusion, though, is if you are a hot sauce veteran, The Last Dab won't kill you. It will burn you, but in the big picture, it's manageable.
I’m still going to stick with my two preferred all-time favorites – Blair’s Original Death Sauce and Pain is Good Batch #37 – for a large percentage of my hot sauce needs when pairing with food. And, of course, I rotate my own homemade sauces in as needed. But as with all the other new sauces I buy, I will keep going back to this one occassionally for use with chips for a spicy snack, because it’s tasty and intriguing. And HOT.
